Porn-loving malware is regularly sneaking into Android's Google Play store, with hundreds of seemingly legit apps secretly visiting porn sites to click on the ads.
Over the last seven months more than 300 malicious porn clicker trojan apps have snuck past Google's security checks into Android's app store, resulting in millions of downloads, according to ESET security researchers.
Unlike many trojans, this porn clicker malware is not designed to steal passwords, hold your data to ransom or empty your bank account. Instead it quietly lurks in the background, chewing through your data allowance as it visits porn sites and clicks on ads to make money for the site owners.
Porn clicker malware hasn't snuck its way into legit Android apps, instead it is hidden in a wide range of bogus apps which masquerade as legit versions of Tinder, GTA San Andreas, Dubsmash and other popular downloads. Once installed these bogus apps download a list of porn sites, open an invisible browser session and start clicking on the ads on those sites.
The large-scale click-fraud campaign is the longest and most successful malware infiltration in the history of the Google Play Android app store, according to ESET malware researcher Lukáš Štefanko.
"Google's security team of course fights this campaign and takes the apps off the store pretty frequently. But the malware's authors keep pace and successfully upload new apps to the store," Štefanko says.
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